The Lawless

by John Jakes

  Then came the fourth of September.

  The panic began with the closing of the doors of Jay Cooke and Company at fifteen past noon. Before the day was over, thirty-seven other New York banks and stock brokerage firms had also closed, and the governors of the Stock Exchange had suspended trading indefinitely.

  Cooke’s was bankrupt, they said. The nation’s most solid and reputable financial establishment bankrupt! A representative of the house immediately traveled to Chicago to see Julia. It was not Mr. Robbins. He too had lost everything and had put a pistol to his head. The representative had come to do Julia the courtesy of explaining her position. Actually, she had none. She was wiped out.

  She didn’t understand the representative’s roster of reasons for the collapse of Cooke’s. He cited railroads expanding too fast in Europe. Currency values inflated there and in America. Overproduction. Feverish industrial growth and subsequent overproduction. Skyrocketing prices for everything, which encouraged investment in highly speculative enterprises such as the Northern Pacific. And lastly, plummeting public confidence in government and business, brought to a climax earlier in the year by revelations that the Credit Mobilier had used gifts of its own, highly lucrative stock to elicit favors from members of Congress.

  The representative seemed to comprehend all the interlocking aspects of the disaster. She didn’t. But she did understand when he said a depression lay ahead. She understood it even more completely tonight, because tomorrow, she and Carter would be moving to a boarding-house on the rebuilt West Side.

  The move should have disturbed her. As evidence of worsening economic conditions, it did. But after she’d gotten over her brief and stormy anger—a vestige of the past, in which she’d expected her life to be perpetual tranquility—she’d begun to view the change as something to which she must and would adjust. She had her son. She had her lover whom she managed to see four or five times every year. And she had her work. She needed nothing else except a little food and a roof to shelter her—and never mind the size or location of that roof.

  Odd, the way her role and Gideon’s had reversed, she thought as she visualized his face in the darkness. The house was dark throughout, and silent. All the servants had been released twenty-four hours earlier.

  When she and Gideon had found one another in the aftermath of the fire, she’d been living in an affluent way while he and his family lived very modestly. Now the publisher of the New York Union occupied a splendid new mansion on upper Fifth Avenue—a move undertaken to placate his wife, and one which had not fulfilled its purpose. He said Margaret’s behavior was growing more hostile and erratic because of heavy drinking she now hardly bothered to conceal.

  Most of Gideon’s wealth had been converted to gold bars over a year ago. The Rothman Bank had foreseen a financial crisis on a worldwide scale. Most of Julia’s assets had been on paper, and were gone. In two years, nearly everything in her life and his had changed.

  Except the most important thing of all: their steadfast and steadily maturing love for one another. He said it was all that sustained him in the increasingly difficult relationship with his wife. And it was all that sustained Julia through the long periods when she was traveling, and facing increasingly hostile audiences, and thinking of Gideon as she lay in lonely beds in towns whose names sometimes blurred together until she could no longer remember where she was, or in what place she’d last been spat on or stoned.

  She heard a peculiar noise from the State Street side of the house. She rose and drew her emerald-colored robe around her. It was shabby now. Out of fashion. But she couldn’t afford to discard it.

  She walked quietly down the second-floor corridor to French windows at the front. The windows opened onto a small balcony. Outside, the September moon was brilliant. She clearly saw a band of eight or ten men skulking along the street. They paused in front of her driveway. One pointed. He’d noticed the deserted look of the house. All the windows were bare, the draperies gone.

  She ran to her room. Breathing fast, she opened the trunk in which she’d packed the only clothes she planned to keep. She snatched out a small revolver purchased a few days ago on the advice of one of the departing servants who said looters were operating after dark.

  She dashed back down the hall and opened the French windows just as three of the men started up the drive. They were unemployed, she suspected. Perhaps discharged from plants that had already shut down, as thousands were shutting down in every state.

  She pointed the revolver upward and fired a shot. “Not this place!” one of the men yelled. He turned and fled. The others followed.

  Carter came racing from his bedroom. “Ma, why did you use the gun?”

  “Nothing to worry about, dear. Some vagrants were prowling around the house. They’re gone.”

  Carter surveyed the empty driveway below. “You should have let me shoot. I’d have nailed one of them.”

  There was no great conceit in the statement, just an assertion of fact. Carter Kent was only eleven but he was already half a head taller than his mother. His jet black eyes and hair—so like his father’s, yet so different—were turning him into a handsome young man.

  For a moment, though, his confidence deserted him.

  “Why is all this happening, Ma? I don’t like it much.”

  She ruffled his hair. “I don’t either. But nothing remains the same for long. Change is one of the few constants in life, and you’ll discover that as you grow older. Bad times have come to the country, Carter. Come very suddenly and unexpectedly—”

  “Bad times for us too, aren’t they? I won’t ever get another taste of cook’s pecan pie.”

  She smiled. “You’ll survive. So will I.” She kissed his forehead. “As long as I have you.”

  “And Gideon?”

  Softly: “Yes, Carter. And Gideon.”

  After the first time, she’d never again entertained him in her bedroom. They met discreetly, in other cities. But now and then Carter saw arriving mail which included a letter with Gideon’s name on it. Once he’d been bold enough to ask whether Gideon was some kind of special friend. That much she had admitted. Probably her son had guessed a good deal more from the way she spoke and looked as she answered. She made it a point not to act embarrassed or ashamed when Gideon’s name came up in conversation. She didn’t flaunt him to Carter, but neither did she deny his importance.

  The boy gnawed his lower lip for a moment. “Ma?”

  “What?”

  “Would you like Gideon to marry you?”

  “Very”—her voice broke slightly—“very much.”

  “But he can’t ever do that, can he?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I figured out. Since he’s already married, you’ll just be friends for the rest of your life.”

  “Yes.” Her heart ached. “Friends.”

  Something oppressive seemed to close in around her then—a fear whose source she couldn’t immediately locate. She packed Carter back to bed and returned to the front window, opening it and stepping onto the little balcony. She gazed north toward the central business district, where a miracle of rebuilding had taken place since the fire. The brilliant moonlight flooded down on Twentieth Street and Thomas Courtleigh’s mansion beyond.

  Naturally Courtleigh had survived the panic. He was the sort who would. It was Courtleigh who was the cause of her fear, she realized. He’d harassed her relentlessly during the past two years. At least she assumed he was the one responsible for the almost constant verbal and physical abuse she took during her lectures these days. Fortunately none of the other speakers who worked for the Association had been harassed in similar fashion. If they had been, Julia would have quit.

  For some reason, Gideon hadn’t been bothered since a brief flurry of trouble right after his return to New York late in ’71. Julia knew better than to think Courtleigh had forgotten her lover, or forgiven him.

  Early in 1872 the railroad president had married Gwendolyn Strother. The
y’d taken a long European wedding trip. People continued to say Mrs. Courtleigh was—well, the charitable used the terms high strung or excitable. Julia’s servants as well as tradespeople who called at both houses employed stronger language. They said Mrs. Courtleigh was not quite right in the head.

  In some accounts Julia had heard, Courtleigh’s wife was reputed to have been unstable since childhood. In others, it was Gideon’s visit that was said to be responsible for her condition. Julia doubted the latter story, though she supposed the melodramatic and by now notorious scene at the ball hadn’t exactly helped the young woman’s state of mind.

  Julia had seen Courtleigh up close only once since his call in the solarium. Recent events had kept her too busy to think of the encounter, but it came to mind now as she stood in the moonlight and gazed north and then west across rooftops and treetops toward the Illinois prairie.

  Just before the Fourth of July, she’d been supervising the trimming of some hedges along Twentieth. Courtleigh’s brougham had turned out of his coach yard, and he’d hailed her from the window. Warily, she’d stepped to the curb. He’d greeted her with a tip of his hat, though there was no cordiality in his hazel eyes.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Sedgwick—or Mrs. Sedgwick? I always get so confused addressing a woman like you. Ah well. I’d like to remind you that I made certain promises—”

  “I haven’t forgotten them,” she snapped back. “The thugs you send to every one of my lectures make that impossible.”

  “Thugs?” He blinked. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” But of course he did, and mirth in his hazel eyes said so. “I wasn’t thinking of you so much as of your—friend.” The pause lent a lascivious quality to the last word. “Remind him that while I sometimes get very busy with other projects, and thus may seem to neglect promises, I do not in fact forget them. I eventually keep every one I make. Mr. Kent should ponder that each night before he goes to sleep. So should you. Good day.”

  Remembering, she gripped the edge of the balcony rail. For the first time, her confidence in her ability to endure an uncertain future ebbed away.

  “I mustn’t lose you, Gideon,” she whispered. “I mustn’t.”

  She shook her head. It did no good muttering to herself. She must write Gideon. Remind him of the ever-present threat Courtleigh represented.

  A cloud passed across the face of the moon. The resulting darkness only worsened her fear. She was ashamed of that, yet the fear persisted. Back in her room, she couldn’t fall asleep. Wild thoughts went tumbling through her head.

  Darkness falling on the land.

  Men roaming the streets and roads.

  Out of work.

  Hungry.

  Desperate enough to do anything for anyone who will pay them.

  And Courtleigh hadn’t forgotten.

  “He hasn’t, Gideon,” she breathed in the stillness. “You don’t dare think he has, because that’s just when he’ll strike.”

  Chapter V

  Tompkins Square

  i

  “I HAVE NO business attending a rally conducted by radicals,” Theo Payne said as he and Gideon left the Union one day almost five months later. “P. J. McGuire is socialist and so is his Committee on Public Safety.”

  Gideon laughed as they started toward a hack stand on Park Row. It was a mild winter day, bright but cloudy; the thirteenth of January, 1874. “I think you have your verbs mixed up, Theo. McGuire may have organized the rally but it certainly won’t be conducted by radicals. The mayor is scheduled to speak. And Johnny Swinton of the Sun.” Swinton was chief editorial writer for the rival paper.

  “That’s the sole reason I’m going. I want to watch Johnny reveal his new insanity to the world at large.”

  There was no point arguing. He could never convince Payne that the hundreds of unemployed men and women at Tompkins Square would be voicing demands that were eminently reasonable. The rally had been arranged to protest the epidemic unemployment afflicting New York and other major cities. Local trade unions wanted the city council to temporarily forbid evictions by landlords, appropriate some money for emergency relief, and start a public works program to create jobs. Payne and many others considered those proposals fully as socialistic as some of the men making them.

  Gideon glanced at his watch. They were already twenty minutes late for the start of the program. He’d been detained in a meeting with one of those so-called advertising agents who were popping up everywhere these days. The agents centralized the purchase of advertising space on behalf of a list of clients. Of course they earned a substantial markup in the process, but they offered newspapers a definite advantage. By paying promptly on behalf of their clients, the agent relieved a paper of the burden of collecting from slow-paying or defaulting customers. The agent who’d called on Gideon, a representative of the N. W. Ayer firm of Philadelphia, had placed a large order for space. He therefore wanted the publisher’s personal attention and he’d gotten it.

  As the two men crossed the square, Gideon gave only slight notice to an unusually tall Street Arab lounging against the Franklin statue. In the autumn just passed, he might have scrutinized the shabbily clad youth more closely. At that time Julia’s letter of warning had been fresh in his mind. For a few weeks he was very watchful as he moved around town. Nothing happened. By the end of December he relaxed again.

  The story of Torvald Ericsson’s death had never appeared in the Union. By the time Gideon was in a position to order it put into type, the charges were not only unprovable but stale. He’d had a hot argument with Payne about it. The editor maintained—and correctly, Gideon had to admit once his anger cooled—that Sidney Florian’s disappearance in the fire removed the sole source of evidence to support the charges. Without evidence, a statement that Courtleigh had sanctioned murder was only supposition.

  “If you want to practice that kind of journalism, Gideon, let’s go all the way. Let’s pack the paper with accusations against anyone we dislike. We can call your banker a Shylock, my wife a Bowery chippy, President Grant a sot and a spoilsman and do it all with a perfectly clear conscience.”

  He was only willing to bow to Payne because he felt sure another time would come when Courtleigh would err on the side of repression and get caught at it. Then Gideon would have his hide. In print.

  Payne hailed the first hack in line. Gideon called to the driver, “Tompkins Square,” and jumped inside. A moment later the vehicle was speeding north along Chatham Street and then into the traffic of the Bowery.

  The tall street boy had been loitering along behind them, within earshot. As soon as the carriage sped away, he dashed for a nearby office that transmitted telegraph messages to other points in the city.

  ii

  Tompkins Square had originally been laid out as a military drill ground. Though still used by militia units, it had now become a park that was being slowly swallowed by the expanding ghetto. The square’s northern and southern boundaries were East Tenth and East Seventh Streets. The hack approached along the latter thoroughfare, from the west. Traffic was so heavy, Payne and Gideon were forced to pay the driver at First Avenue, then walk.

  A huge crowd had been turned out by the trade unions and socialist clubs. Men, women and youngsters packed the square and spilled into Avenues A and B on either side. As Gideon and his companion pushed their way along the noisy, congested sidewalk in front of Seventh Street tenements, more socialists came parading toward the site of the rally. They marched four abreast to the music of a small band. The winter sky shed a dull light on bare heads and plumes of breath. Most of the marchers wore some sort of improvised red sash over the shoulder or around the waist.

  Payne and Gideon took note of three stern New York policemen on horseback near the curb. Elsewhere in the crowd Gideon began to discern uniformed foot patrolmen. All of the police were armed with long, thick wooden clubs.

  Payne pursed his lips. “Who turned out so many of our finest, I wonder?”

  Gideon shook his head
. In the street, another socialist club was marching along from First Avenue. A red beard streaked with white caught Gideon’s eye. He stretched on tiptoe.

  “Sime?” He waved. “Over here!”

  Stepping to the beat of a snare drum, Strelnik swiveled his head. He saw Gideon. He faced front again with no sign of recognition. Slowly Gideon lowered his hand. His face was somber.

  “Is the program under way?” Payne asked. His height kept him from seeing much besides backsides on the crowded sidewalk. Again Gideon went up on his toes.

  “Doesn’t appear to be. The square’s full, though. Speakers are on the platform. Oh, there’s Frank Jamison—”

  Gideon squeezed by an elderly woman in a red sash. Payne followed him to the side of the Herald reporter they both knew. “I thought the rally was due to start thirty minutes ago,” Gideon said to Jamison.

  The Herald man was leaning against the corner of a small grocery with a closed sign in its window. He puffed his cigar before answering, “There’s been a delay. Some objection from city hall. The mayor isn’t going to speak after all. And he’s withdrawn permission for the rally.”

  “You mean all these people are gathered illegally?” Payne said.